


firestarter

by cuthbert



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: But This Time At Least He's Trying, Canon Backstory, Character Study, Childhood, Cid Kramer Is A Shitty Dad, Fire Powers, Gen, Hospitals, Not Beta Read, crit welcome, kid logic isn't like adult logic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 12:39:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13613562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuthbert/pseuds/cuthbert
Summary: Sometimes Cid wonders if he was ever cut out to raise children. That one of the boys he's stuck with has a tendency to set things on fire when he's scared doesn't help.(flash fic; it's short.)





	firestarter

There is the smell of disinfectant heavy in the air, and also what he’ll later learn is the stink of people dying. It is a cheaply-maintained inner-city hospital, and Cid has disappeared and Squall has disappeared and Seifer is panicky and angry and so of course everything goes wrong, because why wouldn’t it, leaving a firebrand-child alone in a waiting room that smells of death and vain attempts to cleanse it. 

 

Cid returns to the sight of his sort-of son standing on a chair, hands and head wreathed in flame that only seems to burn the people who try to grab him. The chair is smoking, because why wouldn’t it be, with a tiny human-wrapped inferno standing on it. He is screaming, of course, reedy tiny thin voice even reedier and crackling from how long he must have been, or maybe just how loud - “WHERE’S MY BROTHER GIVE ME BACK MY BROTHER WHERE IS HE WHERE IS MY BROTHER -” and on and on in the same vein. 

 

He has not yet learned that the stink in hospitals is death barely concealed, but Cid can tell he knows. Why wouldn’t he? They’d found him in what was left of a field hospital, after all, playing with some dead soldier’s name-plate necklace; he kept the necklace, wore it even now. He knows death even if he doesn’t know he knows it. All the children of the war do. Even Zell woke up screaming sometimes, Quistis left and returned and left and returned because she knew too much and no adults could handle it that they could find, and now it was just him and the too-quiet-too-loud pair of boys he privately didn’t want to give up on but so often despaired of taming.

 

Seifer’s eyes finally meet his own, and the fires around him gutter out. An orderly makes a move to grab at him, and Cid surprises himself, old rugby-team reflexes coming back out as he shoves the man aside and lets the boy who was on fire fling himself into his arms. He is sobbing, was already crying, and he is so small and so scared and not making any more sense than he was when he was screaming now that he’s lowered the volume. “I promise I’ll be good bring him back I don’t want him t-to go away please I promise I won’t be bad ever again please just make them give him back please -” 

 

He blames himself for Squall falling ill. Child-logic is twisty like that, Edea might have said. It hits Cid like he hit the man now wheezing on the ground behind him, as it always does: he misses her so much, she was always better with the children.

**Author's Note:**

> The "they found Seifer wandering around a battlefield and his necklace is basically some dead guy's dogtag" bit is supposedly in the Ultimania for FFVIII, or some other bit of supplemental canon. So's his pyrokinesis being a weird ki thing and not fire magic of some kind. I wish I had links, but I don't, sorry.
> 
> I may eventually rewrite and expand this to explain where Cid found Dr. Kadowaki, but for now it is what it is.


End file.
